“1913 Abraham Lincoln film found in NH barn cleanup”
And straight from the Holy Crap! files, “1913 Abraham Lincoln film found in NH barn cleanup”:
CONCORD, N.H. — In a tale celebrating the romance of movies, a contractor cleaning out an old New Hampshire barn destined for demolition found seven reels of nitrate film inside, including the only known copy of a 1913 silent film about Abraham Lincoln.
“When Lincoln Paid,” a 30-minute film about the mother of a dead Union soldier asking Lincoln to pardon a Confederate soldier whom she had initially turned in, stars the brother of John Ford, director of “The Grapes of Wrath,” “The Quiet Man,” and other classics.
“I was up in the attic space, and shoved away over in a corner was the film and a silent movie projector, as well,” Peter Massie, a movie buff, said of his discovery in the western New Hampshire town of Nelson. “I thought it was really cool.”
It was the summer of 2006, and the film canisters sat in his basement for a while before Massie thought of contacting nearby Keene State College, where film professor Larry Benaquist thought it was a rare find.
After working with the George Eastman House film preservation museum in Rochester, N.Y., the college determined that the film, directed by and starring Francis Ford, did not exist in film archives. In fact, it was one of eight silent films starring Ford as Lincoln; there are no known surviving copies of the others.
“The vast majority of silent films, particularly from the early period — the first decade of the 20th century — are gone,” said Caroline Frick Page, curator of motion pictures at George Eastman House. “That’s what makes these stories so incredibly special.”
In this handout photo courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences director and film star Francis Ford is seen in the roll of Abraham Lincoln in a 1913 film that had been lost for 97 years. (AP Photo)
Francis Ford, who died in 1953 at age 72, is better known for small, mostly comic roles in at least 30 of his younger brother’s films, “often playing a coonskin drunk who can spit across the room,” said Tag Gallagher, author of the book “John Ford.”
“If you’re into these things you quickly recognize him and it becomes a kind of cult thing to finding him, and he’s quite delightful,” said Gallagher, who lives near Boston. “But if you go back to the teens, he was a very big and important director.”
The Fords were from Portland, Maine. Francis Ford, who introduced John Ford to the business, was quite famous as a director and star, acting in numerous silent films up until World War I, Gallagher said. When John Ford started directing, his fame overshadowed his brother’s.
Old movie buffs might remember Francis Ford in such scenes as a drunken juror in 1939’s “Young Mr. Lincoln” starring Henry Fonda, and an elderly man who miraculously rises from his deathbed to see a climactic fistfight in 1952’s “The Quiet Man” starring John Wayne.
A clip from the film:
http://www.youtube.com/v/LHOtP0mAdRk&hl=en_US&fs=1&